Festival of Learning 2018

Care can take many forms. Post-secondary institutions are looking to provide care and support to students and staff around issues such as inclusivity, accessibility, and social justice through the thoughtful selection of Open Education Resources (OERs). But often there is confusion around how OERs can be located, evaluated, and used ethically by instructors and curriculum personnel (Belikov & Bodily, 2016; Jhangiani, et.al., 2016). This was seen at our institution, where a lack of OER policy and procedures caused the implementation by instructors and curriculum personnel to be lukewarm.

At the same time, our institution is looking to be a good steward of the budget by using OERs to address the financial pressure associated with curriculum development. These two visions, which sometimes appear to be competing with each other, can be addressed in clear institutional OER policy and procedures.

Our intention in this presentation is to share the creation of Southern Alberta Institution of Technology’s (SAIT) first OER Policy and Procedure. We’ll bring participants along on the journey which involved a determination of our readiness (Simmons, 2017), a review of existing Canadian and American institutional OER policies, our feedback process from diverse stakeholders, as well as the development of an institutional communication plan, and then share the final policy.

We will also discuss how the creation of policy and procedure may influence and broaden institutional viewpoints around inclusivity and social justice.

Included will be a brief semi-structured discussion with the presentation participants around roadblocks, concerns, and current practices at their institutions. Small groups will be encouraged to brainstorm strategies to create policy-based best practices at their institutions.